IMPACT: Intellipediais used by more than3,000 analysts across16 different federalintelligence agencies.About 2 millionsearches a month aremade across the site.Its use has grownbeyond defense andintelligence agencies.The State Departmentnow uses the site tokeepits diplomats worldwideup-to-date.

DURATION: Ongoing.COST: $700,000 a year tooperate Intellipedia.

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE 2001 terrorist attacks, the intelligenceagencies were criticized for their inability to share information.Seven years later, however, analysts across the CIA, FBI and otheragencies swap what they know with one another through an internalWeb destination called Intellipedia. The result is a collectiveintelligence that can go beyond the smarts of any one agency.

The site is the work of the Office of the Directory of NationalIntelligence, which was formed in 2003 to help intelligenceagencies pool their information. ODNI now manages Intellipedia,along with a number of other cross-agency collaborativeinitiatives.

'The fundamental goal of creating DNI was to give us a farmore comprehensive view of what the intelligence community has, tomake it far more interoperative and drive us toward decisionadvantage,' said

Richard Russell, a deputy associate director of nationalintelligence at ODNI. Russell now leads ODNI's office forIntelligence Community Enterprise Solutions, which overseesIntellipedia. Russell said most of the work needed to facilitateinformation sharing was political, not technological. But whatshould not be underestimated is how quickly the agency'sEnterprise Solutions office has moved to install systems thatanalysts everywhere can easily use, in effect providing the toolsthat allow ODNI to carry out its duty.

The agency's most well-known piece of information-sharingtechnology ' though it's the only one ' isIntellipedia, a 600,000-page-and-growing wiki platform thatanalysts across the different federal agencies use to share whatthey've learned.

Intellipedia grew from a much larger and older research anddevelopment initiative, called Intelink. Initiated by the CIA inthe mid-1990s, Intelink sought new and innovative ways to poolresources in the intelligence community. At first the idea would beto give each office a Web page that could be updated.

But it was the deployment of easily updated commercial wikisoftware that took hold. The idea was simple: Set up a Web sitewhere intelligence officers and other personnel could easily postinformation they thought would be of interest to the community.Others can add to this information, link it to other facts orrefute it. Unlike the pages posted on Intelink, information doesnot have to be sent up the chain of command for approval.

The idea was to replicate, on a set of closed networks withappropriately cleared users, the massively popular onlineencyclopedia Wikipedia. With Wikipedia, the sum total of knowledgeis aggregated from participants around the globe and potentiallyrepresents a much larger body of knowledge than could be assembledby any one organization.

'In that collaboration, we come out with a really good,concise and valid set of information about what we think is goingon,' Russell said.

With input from more than 160 agencies, the site gets more than65,000 edits each day. Intelligence analysts search the site morethan 2 million times a month. Its reach has extended beyond theintelligence community and into the Defense Department and evenmany civilian agencies. The State Department has mandated that someof its personnel use Intellipedia to communicate diplomaticinformation. The traditional approach of alerting diplomats viacable worked well enough, but if that same information was postedto a wiki page, others could incorporate that information, too.

Intellipedia gathers what has not been routinely gatheredbefore. Each intelligence agency has its own specialty: TheNational Security Agency keeps its ears peeled to foreigncommunications. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agencycollects satellite imagery. 'Every agency has its owntake,' said Ramon Barquin, president of business intelligenceconsulting firm Barquin International. ODNI performs an essentialtask by bringing together all the information under one roof sothat when the time comes to make a decision about some vitalmatter, all the supporting evidence can be easily consulted,Barquin said.

ODNI is also smart enough to understand the new generation ofintelligence analysts is far more accustomed to using Web 2.0technologies as a way to communicate, Barquin said.

In particular, one Web 2.0 technology, the wiki, attractedmillions of users who otherwise bypassed commercial collaborationtechnology because a wiki has the virtue of being a 'bottomuprather than top-down' technology, said Tony Byrne, co-founderof the CMS Watch. As a more casual medium, wikis encourage moreparticipation without the stigma of making participation anofficial mandate.

The intelligence community is smart to use wikis and evensmarter for using them in a controlled fashion. Both Byrne andBarquin praised ODNI for understanding that projects such asIntellipedia should be managed loosely ' but still bemanaged. A project needs more direction than relying on the wisdomof the masses, as Byrne puts it.

'In the last two years that I have been involved in this,I have seen us make progress that most people would have neverthought possible,' Russell said of the agency'sinformation-sharing activities. 'We have made more progressin the past two years than in the 20-some years beforethat.'

Not an agency to rest on its laurels, ODNI is working on anumber of additional projects, along with other agencies, to extendthe shared space. One will be what Russell called an analyticenclave, called A-Space. This work area will allow analysts to posttheir research, so that others can read and add information. Itincludes video and document-sharing services and a search service.DNI is also working with the intelligence agencies on a sharedrepository of materials, called the Library of NationalIntelligence. It already has more than 640,000 reports andeventually will be used by all 16 intelligence agencies.

The idea is to broaden the reach of data being shared, and,eventually, fuse historical knowledge with real-time data, Russellsaid.

'Fundamentally, the conundrum is, can you discovereverything we know? Can you get access to everything we'veproduced? And if you can, then you can leverage thatinformation,' Russell said.

Intellipedia uses opensourceMediaWiki software,the same used by Wikipedia.Likewise, other services onthe agency's Intelink platformuse Web 2.0 software.A video-sharing service onIntelink, called iVideo, isbuilt on the Flash VideoFormat (FVF), the same formatused by YouTube. Aphoto-sharing service is builton the same foundation usedby Flickr, and a tagging serviceis loosely based on thepopular Del.ico.us Webservice.

The Library of NationalIntelligence uses an Oracle10 relational database system,along with an ApacheWeb server, the Mongrelserver for delivering servicesfrom Ruby-based programminglibraries. SunMicrosystems provides theservers and storage.

'Every line of custom codeis a stovepipe to the rest ofthe world,' said RichardRussell, an ODNI deputyassociate director of nationalintelligence. 'We wantcommercial off-the-shelf.We use service-orientedarchitecture standards sothat everyone can utilize [aservice], no matter whatplatform they are on.'

If ODNI wants changes, itcontacts the company or, ifthe software is open source,the developers try to getchanges made. With thattype of service, all users ofthe software, not just thefederal government, canenjoy the improvements.